pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

There is something you have to understand about Laura. She is so organised. I absolutely love it. I want to be like that when I grow up. She is a real live poster child for the girl guides, I tell you. (No really, she even makes adorable guide patches like this.) But to give you a full picture of Laura’s calm and organised nature, she got married on the fourth of September 2010. A week before that, she realised all the things on her to-do list were well and truly done, and that could only mean there was time to add something extra. So we arranged to spend the first of September trying out charity shop cameras and making a jar full of badges. Just because. Let’s just say that many days before my wedding I was convincing The Boy he really did need to get a suit and a haircut! (He did both, I promise.)

I love this little touch she came up with and I have a badge-maker, so between three of us, this project was done in no time at all really. We used the Badge-It badge-maker and a few packs of refills, plus a simple text design in the colours and fonts of the wedding invitations, which we printed onto white Bazzill cardstock then cut out with scissors and the handy-dandy tracing template that comes with the badge-maker. (I’m thinking now that the nested circle dies might make that job easier, but I didn’t have a set then plus I find chatting and scissoring to be a quite therapeutic activity but die-cutting takes too much elbow grease to be sociable at the same time.) Lots of turns on the badge machine and then a quick job to stick all the backs on and pop them into a jar made extra pretty with a pink butterfly rub-on.

The jar lived on the bar during their reception and sure enough, through the evening more and more people were identified with their Team Bride or Team Groom affiliation and the jar emptied. Such a cute wedding DIY project!

Making badges from shimelle on Vimeo.

And so we draw Wedding Week 2011 to a close! And I have a little something up my sleeve starting Monday. But you’ll have to come back then to find out what on earth it could be!

xlovesx

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So this became this, just in time to wish this lovely and her mister a very happy first anniversary. There’s an awful lot of swoon packed into wedding week! (By the way, I’m pretty excited about what starts tomorrow to follow wedding week… but I’m not telling until Monday!)

On top of all those rectangles of scrap paper, I added two 4×6 photos and a host of premade embellishments – die-cuts, stickers and a flair badge. I find I now automatically think of their wedding when I use pink and green together, and I still have a stack of prints from their day so why go against what seems to work? I love how the wooden letters they had as a decorative touch will also work well as an introductory page in my album. (I’m sure that’s exactly what they were thinking, right?)

~Sources: one, two, three, four, five and six.~

Here are six of my favourites from the last starting point. Click the corresponding link to see the page in more detail and get to know the scrapper behind the layout.

Thanks to everyone who took on the first starting point challenge! The current starting point can be found here. Upload your layout by Friday and it could be featured in next Saturday’s post!

xlovesx

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How about a bit of plain old wedding pretty for wedding week? The lovely Leanne and Kevin got married not even two weeks ago in a day filled with bright colours and big character. It started out sunny and right about ceremony time, the heavens opened and left us with a big conundrum of what we could do instead of a confetti shot. I will tell you this: it takes longer than you would think to convince everyone in a lobby that they can stand on a staircase!

But the rain left right in time for the reception and there was glorious sunshine until the day was done. And other glorious things like cupcakes and pick & mix and a photo booth and gorgeous multi-coloured bouquets. So let me share an enormous amount of happy wedding photos with you!

And just in case that was not enough fun for one wedding, there was a…

Bouncy. Castle.

True story.

Many, many congratulations and well wishes to you, Leanne & Kevin!

xlovesx

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In celebration of our third wedding anniversary, we have a rather exceptional day on the cards.

It involves The Boy on jury service and the girl waiting in for an electrician because our dishwasher has been recalled and could apparently set itself alight at any moment.

It’s an amazing anniversary plan, right? I’m glad we wait all year for such a special schedule of celebration! I am wondering why we didn’t do this last year, because a cupcake date, a stroll round an art gallery and picking out a new dress is just nothing compared to this year’s plan. Forevermore may we celebrate our wedded bliss with criminal justice and the prevention of kitchen fires.

(But on the plus side, we have dinner reservations at our favourite restaurant. And if you are ever anywhere near Tasmania, go-go-GO have Chelsea Parsons take your picture because she is amazing. And she took that photo at the top of this post. While we were living out of backpacks. Which is somehow more glamorous than waiting in for the electrician, but I digress. Chelsea is awesome, just so you know.)

Have a beautiful day without a single bit of spontaneous combustion in your kitchen. New 4×6 Photo Love later today!

xlovesx

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_{©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies and details.}

This time last year, I declared it wedding week on my blog and you know what? I’m thinking this should be an annual event. So welcome to Wedding Week 2011! How’s that for spontaneous theming? By now I’ve probably shared way more wedding things from my own wedding than can be exciting to anyone who isn’t me, but rest assured I have actually attended weddings of other people. It’s an amazing concept. So if I add their wedding fun into the mix, I’m pretty sure there’s a whole week of stuff to share. (Plus, there’s a new 4×6 Photo Love class tomorrow, so if you have scrapping time today and haven’t entered the seven photo challenge, hop to it while you still have two chances to win!)

To kick off Wedding Week, here are three scrapbook pages I made for the wedding themed garden at Two Peas this summer. This first page is a real rarity for me – no writing! I really thought about that for a while because pages without any writing really sadden me. When you see just one page at a time in a scrapper’s gallery, it’s easy to assume that one page without any writing is representative of albums filled with pages without writing and I can’t cope with that idea. If we never write on our pages, there is very little to differentiate a beautiful scrapbook page from one of those shoeboxes of old photos in an antique store, with all the pictures of unidentified people doing unidentified things. I really want more than that from my albums.

But I think by now you know that. And sometimes it’s nice to just have a page here or there with just a photo, like a chapter break in a novel. Breathing room. So I added this to my album with no writing. But I assure you, it’s surrounded by pages with plenty of words indeed.

_{©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies and details.}

At our reception, we used books instead of numbers to mark the tables. So that needed a little explanation in our wedding album. It was quite funny to see the people on each table try to make a connection to the book chosen to represent them. Sometimes there was a definite link to the guests… other times it was just a book that had some sort of meaning to both of us.

_{©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies and details.}

And this page makes a break in the album between the fancier professional photos and the haphazard images that came from the vintage cameras on each table. I wanted to start that section with a bit of explanation as to why the old cameras were there, as several people had mentioned in advance that surely we wouldn’t get any decent photos from these cameras at all. And truly, the vast majority are blurry, under-, over- or double-exposed and of course very grainy as they were all shot indoors without flash. But there were plenty of pictures that made them completely worthwhile – unexpected photos that captured great expressions and different combinations of guests. I love those pictures and am so very glad we had film as well as digital on our wedding day.

So… let’s see what other wedding fun I can find to share this week! And maybe you’ll join me in making a wedding-themed project or two!

xlovesx

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I spent yesterday at the wedding of a lovely scrapbooking friend, Leanne and her main man, Kevin. Just wanted to share this little jump for joy and send then many, many congratulations and much happiness for their newly married life!

Enjoy your getaway and see you when you’re back!

xlovesx

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This idea of how individual pages make a full album is something that’s on my mind so much recently. It applies to that idea of adding in more photos or writing to help things make sense, but it also applies to the design. We can create pages with so very much in that 12×12 space – plenty of photos and patterned papers and accents. As we turn the pages in our albums, those sorts of pages become less appreciated when our eyes get a bit tired from taking in all the details.

Every once in while, I love the break from a really detailed page to go with something simple that leaves plenty of room for your eyes to relax. It helps if you really love the patterned paper, like this lovely and simple floral from the Ever After collection by Pebbles. That helps a minimal design not look too stark, but still less overwhelming than some more crowded pages. So this page will work like that – with the design kept to just two colours and half the page space!

One other product I love from Pebbles that is easy to miss – Candy Dots. They are simple little dots in pearls, jewels or buttons, with a glue dot there on the back so you can just add them without any messing about with the adhesive. This pink and green wedding was accented with grey, so I used grey Candy Dots in the middle of each butterfly. They are such a simply way to dress up a layout with that special something!

How about a challenge? Create a layout that only uses half the page. It can be whatever half you would like, but somewhere around half the page space needs to be breathing room!

Many thanks to Pebbles for sponsoring this challenge! You can find them on Facebook and Twitter, so be sure to follow them!

One entry will be selected to win a prize pack of scrapbooking supplies from Pebbles. Entries close at midnight next Sunday (21st August 2011).

Feel free to use the comment section to chat about this challenge, as the entries should go in the linky widget!

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Switching it up for this week’s sketch with a bit of an older layout and no video this week while I’m working on the road (not to worry – the video will be back next Wednesday) because this layout has a few things I’ve been wanting to discuss on a sketch day. Things like using four small images as a photo strip in place of larger images. Or opting for black and white photos but pairing them with plenty of colour. Or the differences from a sketch to a finished page.

When I look at this design in sketch form, it already feels quite busy to me, but if you compare it to the layout, I actually added way more stuff than what’s here on the sketch. Recently someone mentioned they felt my layouts were coming out more “dynamic and alive” from the sketches and goodness, that was just such a lovely thing to say! But it also made me want to identify what it is that created that feeling she wanted to recreate on her own and I think the extra stuff is part of that. When I scrap from a sketch, I start with those basic shapes, but then I put the sketch aside and start adding more bits and pieces with extra layers. A lot of it comes in paper strips – either just plain rectangles or scalloped pieces from die-cuts or border punches. Then I realised I needed more room to journal and added two journaling die-cuts. Then layered those circles to become embellishment rather than just a shape. And eventually decided some butterflies could tie all those different shapes together. (Also I am very excited to tell you this time butterflies are actually relevant, since these photos are from Laura’s wedding and there were butterflies in her wedding decorations!) Perhaps it also helps that when I add extra stuff, I try to add the same stuff in multiple places – so the butterflies repeat, the ribbon repeats, the dotty label stickers and so on. I don’t often scrap from just one collection of supplies, but I do repeat the same elements in multiple places on a page to make it obvious that they belong.

You may want to add more stuff or you may want to stay more in line with the sketch – and either is fine, of course! I love hearing about our process in creating your page, so if you have a real system for how you build or interpret a sketch, feel free to share in the comments!

As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link so we can see your work.

Last week left a few regulars really stumped with the mix of square and standard sized prints on one page, but I loved the variation in the layouts from those who were up to the challenge. Here are four of my favourites this week, and I love how all of them are clearly from the sketch but they have each chosen something in particular to change and make the design their own. Click the corresponding links to see any of these pages in more detail:
Top left
Top right
Bottom left
Bottom right
Thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s sketch! I hope you’ll join us again!

xlovesx

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